


The Ride

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon Backstory, Destiny, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, thieves and thieving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-16 22:51:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4642965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’re all going to hell. Might as well enjoy the ride.” – Bela, 3.03 Bad Day at Black Rock.</p><p>The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is the (real) story of Bela Talbot (real name: Abbey).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ride

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frozen_delight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_delight/gifts).



> Frozen_delight and I share a high regard for Bela, though I didn’t always admire her as I do now: that I came to give her a second chance is largely due to frozen_delight’s good influence. We also share a strong sense of dissatisfaction with the way her character was written out of the show; as though she had been a mistake, irredeemable and forgettable. It had come to my attention some time ago that Bela and Sam are the same age, so when frozen_delight bought a story from me for Help Nepal and prompted simply “Bela fic,” I knew this was the story I had to tell. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier to get my words out, though, so a great big THANK YOU is in order, sweetheart, for your patience in waiting for this. I humbly present to you my Bela headcanon, and I really hope that you enjoy it! ♥
> 
> Thanks to stardust_made for brainstorming and encouragement, to small_hobbit for Brit-picking, and to analineblue for beta reading. And of course, most especially, to frozen_delight for your generosity in the Nepal fandomaid effort. ♥

“Bela, Bela, Bela.”

The voice is soft, fond. Sad. 

“You shouldn’t have done that, Bela.”

There’s a film over her eyes and she can’t move, can barely breathe. Panic-frozen or actually tied down it doesn’t matter, her limbs are not her own. Can’t run can’t scream can’t fight. And then gentle hands and gentle words wash over her. 

“I wish you hadn’t done that, Bela.”

=-=-=

No one wanted me as a child. 

My mother died when I was a baby. I was given to my only known relative, an aunt who couldn’t afford to feed her various addictions as well as a young and hungry mouth, and at six years old I was taken from her. By then I was too old , however, to expect easy placement into a home. Like a cat in a shelter, you know - no longer a cute, adoptable kitten. Too fierce and too unfriendly. I was expected to age out of the system subsisting on the scrap-kindness of foster families, so I ran away when I was ten.

Three years later, bored and peckish, I picked an easy mark out of a crowd. High heels, loose handbag, hair in her face, studying a map. 

I’d been doing well for myself before that, rarely going hungry – idle hands were the devil’s playthings after all and mine were anything but. Clever hands, pretty face, sharp knife: I’d found these assets of mine to be a winning combination. But as I grew bored I also grew sloppy, and that evening in Trafalgar Square I was caught for the first time in my life. 

Her name was Sophie. I don’t know what she saw in me, but rather than slapping my sticky fingers away from her bag she grabbed hold of my wrist and did not let me go. And for my part, when I stopped struggling against her unexpected grasp and looked into her face, I wondered how I ever could have mistaken her for an easy mark. She was a grifter: she was precisely who I wanted to be when I grew up.

We ran together for over a year, and she taught me everything she knew to teach. 

I was already well acquainted with lock picks and safe dials, so from her I learned about clothes and makeup; learned how to run in heels and how to stand my ground. Learned how to read a mark, how to stand out, and how to blend into a scene like so much furniture. Learned how to speak. We watched _My Fair Lady_ together once and we laughed and laughed, but I knew what the real lesson was. I was not a flower girl nor was I an urchin; I was a diamond in the rough and I was going to shine.

I was newly fourteen when Sophie brought me in on my first long con. It was everything I’d been dreaming of since I’d opened my eyes to the world beyond putting food in my belly every day and sleeping warm every night, since Sophie taught me to aspire beyond lifting purses and wallets in tourist season or cracking private safes while someone I didn’t trust stood watch outside the door. With Sophie’s help I would leave that world, those petty acts, behind. I would become a great thief.

She arranged everything, but let me choose my own name. 

-=-=-

“Bela.”

The film is pulled back from her eyes, the fog clearing, and she voices a soft sound of pain. Medical tape, she realises. It’s been gauze over her eyes all this time, nothing more. She flexes one arm, then the other. She’s not paralysed, either, only restrained. The synchronic beep and whir of machinery comes into focus around her. _Hospital_. She’s in a hospital. 

She blinks slowly, once, sucks in a deep breath, and sits up. It’s the oddest sensation, like moving through water. When she looks behind her she sees her own body; sees the tubes and wires and god-knows-what snaking in and around her body, gauze still in place over her eyes, and her own hand in front of her face seems to shimmer. 

“Am I dead?” She asks.

“Very nearly,” he says. “You’re dreaming, Bela. That _is_ your name, isn’t it?”

His eyes are as brazenly gold as they are in her dreams. He smiles at her. He doesn’t blink.

-=-=-

“Bela. But with only one ‘l’, all right?”

Sophie got it right away, and that’s why I loved her. A name is power, isn’t it? I don’t know if Sophie was her real name, I don’t believe that it was. She didn’t tell me to call her that for…oh, I don’t know, for ages. Long enough after we met, anyway, that when she did I took it as a kind of message. 

And, so: _Bella._ ‘Beautiful.’ But with only one L.

“Beauty on your own terms,” she kissed my forehead, smoothed the lines of my freshly-pressed uniform. “Nothing will ever stop you, my love. Bela.”

Sophie set me up as a student at an exclusive girls school in Cheltenham to get close to the daughter of our mark. Mr and Mrs Forsythe had something we wanted, and their daughter, Abigail, was the key to the play.

The problem was, just as I fell in love with Sophie for being more than what I expected, I fell in love with Abigail for being less than what I had feared. I called her Abbey, I was the only one who did. She laughed when she saw how I’d spelt it, the first time I passed her a note in class, but after that she signed all her notes to me that way. _Love, Abbey._

Abbey, you see, was kind. She was the type to share her meals with stray cats and stay up all night when a younger girl was crying from a nightmare or missing her mum. She came from the kind of stock whose scraps and carelessness had been feeding me all me life, and she looked at beggars on the street, at the maids who washed our linens, at pictures of the bloody Queen, at _me_ , with the same soft eyes and compassion. She was kind. More than that she was bright, and for some reason she loved me. She wanted to be my friend, and I desperately wanted to be hers. It was a problem.

The food at Cheltenham was good, and the beds were unbelievably soft. The classes were difficult but Sophie hired a private tutor and it turned out that I took to book learning like I had to picking locks. It seems to be a universal truth about me, that I can’t resist the click and fall of tumblers slotting into place, facts and figures lining up just so. I felt that the world was at my fingertips, but that the future seemed to shine a little brighter when I looked at it with Abbey by my side. 

The problem was, I couldn’t keep Abbey. Abbey was part of the con; Abbey was a means to an end. I couldn’t _steal_ Abbey, and, as I told myself over and over as I found myself dreading the end of the term and my return to my place at Sophie’s side in our impersonal world, Abbey deserved better than my kind of life.

The larger problem came when I discovered that Abbey deserved better than her own kind of life. 

I was fourteen years old and hiding under the covers, long past curfew, sharing secrets with my first real friend. Tomorrow brought the end of term and I would never see her again. She was hiding something from me, I knew. She had been since she told me she had begged her parents to let me come and stay the summer with her, like I’d asked, but they’d said no. I was busy formulating the next step of the plan – how to proceed if I wasn’t to be invited to the Forsythe Estate – and I almost missed it. The way her eyes shifted away from mine in a way they never had before, and I knew that she was lying but not about what, precisely. 

“My mum died when I was a baby,” I told her, relaxing the careful hold I kept over my voice, letting my true accent come through in shifts, like peeling back layers on an onion, and watching her eyes go wide. “Just my mum, though, not both of them like I’ve always said. Truth is, I don’t know my da and he don’t know me. He could be anyone, but I s’pect he’s no one I want to know.”

Abbey took my hand, just as I’d known she would. I was just _me_ , to her, just _Bela_ , no matter where I’d come from.

“Do you remember her?” Abbey asked.

I told her the truth. That I didn’t, that I’d been maybe six months old when the fire happened, and that was all I knew of my life Before. No one had ever told me how I’d survived the fire in my nursery, but I dreamed about it nearly every night. I dreamed a tall, dark stranger with fire in his eyes. I dreamed strong hands and a warmth that flooded me, filled me from within, and I never could feel the heat of fire on my face. I told Abbey these things. I told her how sometimes, when my life had depended on it, I’d felt that same warmth coursing through me, how it felt like a kind of holy, guiding fire directing me how to step, when to run, where to hide. And I told her this odd truth, too: how the fact was I felt that I was destined for great things, but that none of it made me feel so happy, so at home, as her friendship did. I told her that I wished for us to be friends forever.

That was when she told me what her father had done to her. What her father was still doing to her, would resume doing to her the very next day when he came to collect her from school. 

I remembered how I’d been telling myself that I could not _steal_ Abbey. Remembrance and resolution came within the very same breath.

=-=-=

“She wasn’t meant to be in the car.”

Bela is bent over her knees, her face in her hands. Around them, the life and death of the hospital carries on, but the rhythmic whir and beep of equipment, the everyday bustle, is muted to her ears. She keeps her eyes averted from the site of her own comatose body behind her, and the man with the yellow eyes sits with his hands steepled, chin resting on the points of his fingers.

“I told her that I was going to take her away. Sophie and I were going to take her someplace safe, and help her get free. I told her I was going to save her.”

“Bela, Bela, Bela.” A click of his tongue. “You have a funny way of saving people.” 

Just as he has always been in her dreams, the man is cold but bright; aloof but entirely present; the realest thing in the world and still so impossibly alien. He has always scared her, but it’s a biblical kind of terror; Old Testament capital-F Fear of the divine, the almighty. 

“You did it yourself, didn’t you? You slashed the brake line on their car.”

“Yes,” Bela whispers, and pushes her hair back from her face. “But Abbey was supposed to be with me. She was supposed to pack what she needed and meet me out by the stables, but she wasn’t there. She went to her parents instead, she was going home with them. She crashed with them.”

“What then, Bela,” asks the man with the fire in his eyes. “What happened then? Tell me.”

“A girl,” Bela tells him. “A little girl with red eyes came to me. She told me she could fix everything. I told her that nothing could fix anything. My best friend was dying and it was my fault. It should have been me.”

“That’s what you said to her? Bela! Answer me, child!” 

“Yes. That’s what I said to her.” She wraps her arms around her knees, wishing for the will to sob, longing for a force beyond her control to wrack her body and allow her some relief. “I was trying to protect my friend but I killed her instead, and it should have been me in that car.”

“Oh, Bela,” the man sighs, reaches forward and takes her hand, and he seems to be the only solid object in this world of mist. He burns hot and cold at once, and Bela finds nothing within herself, no reserves of either hope or fear, no will to be surprised by this. “Bela. You shouldn’t have done that. You’ve caused no end of trouble for me, I’ll tell you that for free. All this,” he dropped her hand to wave his own expressively, yellow eyes flashing in the hospital gloom. “All this red tape around just exactly _who_ your soul belongs to, now.” 

He shakes his head. “Lilith,” he mutters. “She thinks she’s so clever. And, well. She’s got pluck, I’ll give her that. Even _I_ can’t help but admire her style.”

He leans down and when he straightens he’s lifting a brown leather satchel into view. Though it is scuffed and scratched and stained with blood, Bela recognizes it. It’s Abbey’s school bag.

“Yes,” he says, and pulls from it a familiar card, a student identification badge from their school. “This is what your soul bought you, little Bela. ‘It should have been me,’ you say; ‘Your wish is my command,’ that scheming bitch says. Congratulations. Abbey’s disgusting parents are dead and she is free of them forever. There’s even an inheritance to look forward to – well. That is, if she ever wakes up.”

He tips a look at her and says with significant emphasis, “If _you_ ever wake up.”

“I don’t understand,” Bela whispers, a cold kind of dread spreading under her skin as she realizes that yes, actually, she does.

“That pesky little girl with the red eyes who offered to help you? She’s a demon, Bela, and she took your words a _bit_ too literally. You said you wished it was you in that car? Well, presto-chango, it was.” He holds up the school badge. It’s got her own face printed on it in unflattering greyscale, and beneath it shows the name _Abbey Forsythe_. Bela reaches out, and her ghostly fingers pass through it ineffectually. 

The man with yellow eyes glances out the window at the swiftly lightening sky. “Any minute now, a girl with your name and Abbey’s face is going to be waking up in a hotel bed. She’s not going to know where she is but luckily your dear friend Sophie will be there to comfort her. They will find what I’ve just shown you – a school badge with mismatched name and face. Sophie will check her files and find all the documents she’s been keeping safe for you have been switched as well. In short, Abbey will be waking up to find herself set up with a whole new life, just as you wished: yours.”

Bela fists her hands in her hair, tasting the words in her mouth, _It should have been me_. And then the older, more familiar ones, _Abbey’s too good for my kind of life_. It’s all too much, it makes no kind of sense. Yet it’s all obviously true, so why bother with disbelief. She tugs on her hair when she realizes she’s close to laughing. ‘Too good’? What is her life besides the pursuit of everything that makes life worth living, makes life _good_ – money, glamour, excitement, freedom. She’s survived long enough on her wits to become bloody brilliant at it, long enough to make an art of it. Anyone, she tells herself fiercely, looking up to meet his eyes in defiance, anyone at all, should be thrilled to be given the chance at her life.

“And what about me?”

“You,” the man says, bright eyes going wide. “Why, I thought you didn’t care what happens to you, so long as little miss sunshine walks free.”

She glares at him, phantom nails digging into her phantom palms, and with every second she feels herself growing lighter, unmoored from her body, a ship drifting off to sea with no crew.

“You. Well. Your body is broken, Bela. That good Samaritan act you pulled led you to catch a nasty little coma. And you’ll be crashing in about, oh,” he glances at his bare wrist. “Two minutes. But. _But_ , Bela, I am here to help you.”

“Help me,” she’s panicking, struggling against her flagging strength and the bed sheets tangled around her insubstantial limbs. The tick of the clock and noise of the room crashes back in on her, the wail of the flat-line and the rush of the orderlies and doctors around her, and she feels as though she is drowning, there’s no way he’ll hear her as she cries out, desperate, “Help me? Who are you? How do you know who I am, why do I dream about you?”

“You dream about me because I made you. And I’m here to help you for the same reason. I will help you, Bela. I just need you to agree to my terms. If I heal you, if I hold off your Reaper long enough to let them jump-start your body, will you agree to what I ask you to do?”

Bela nods. She nods, and then she says, “Yes.”

The man fixes his yellow eyes on her then, cold and kind and boring into her very heart from a million miles away. Someone calls, “Clear!” and she’s jolted back, pain receding almost immediately, a cloying kind of serenity descending. She closes her eyes and feels that old familiar warmth filling her from her core, spreading and spreading, and though she can’t see anything she can see him. Silently, she asks him _why_ ; she asks him _what_. She’s clairvoyant, for this one single moment, and she knows this depth and breadth of all-knowledge won’t last, but she wants to know. _I want to know._

So he tells her.

And then he tells her: “I want you to know that I was rooting for you, kid. You’ve been one of my very favorites, right from the start.” He falls silent for a moment, and then he spells out just what exactly she has done: “In ten years’ time, Bela, you are going to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into hell. And not even I will be able to stop it.”

-=-=-

I leave Sophie a note in our cipher asking her not to come looking for me, implying that I planned it all, subtly begging her to look out for Abbey – for me. I know that she will. She may wonder for the rest of her life how her barely-teenaged protégé was able to forge a set of identification papers so complete that no one will ever suspect that her little friend Bela – not that Abbey will go by _Bela_ , of course, other than the school badge all of her papers and forms show my real name, a name that never meant anything to me that I am only too glad to be leaving behind – was once Abbey yes-of-the-Gloucestershire Forsythes. 

I gather Abbey’s few personal belongings and check myself out of the hospital, his hand on my shoulder, his calm voice deflecting all those objections and incredulous stares and grasping hands that want to keep me here, put me under a microscope, claim me as a miracle for walking out past my expiration date. 

“Bela,” the man says, his hands in his pockets and his blazing eyes turned toward the rising sun. “You are a unique child, with a unique set of skills. And while I may have, so to speak, lost the custody battle for you, I’d like to keep in touch. I have some…friends…yes, let’s call them friends. Friends who may drop in on you from time to time, may ask you for help. I would be most appreciative, Bela, if you would indulge them when they do. For my sake.”

I don’t know who this man is, or why he came for me, why he claims some kind of affection for me or any claim on my _skills_. But I don’t care. Once I’m out of doors and breathing free air, I don’t care. I don’t even care if what he said is true: _In ten years’ time you are going to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into hell_. For now, I am alive. And, somewhere close by, so is Abbey. If this is what my life was for, my purpose, perhaps I ought rejoice to have come across it so early. Ten years is a lifetime, and if I know where it ends, nothing can stop me from enjoying the ride.

I stretch my arms in the cool summer morning, an old familiar itch starting in my fingers and my feet.

“How about America?” I ask. 

He smiles at me, and lifts his hand. His yellow eyes flash. “As you wish,” he says, and snaps his fingers.


End file.
